CVS Implementation

I want to implement CVS for our Java (web) development, so I am using NetBeans as a development tool. My question is should I put entire NetBeans project to CVS repository and check out entire project or add only required file to CVS repository and check out required file to separate NetBeans project ?

It's possible to do things either way. If your developers have a standard corporate desktop, so that paths and IDE settings are likely to be just the same for everyone, then you can check the IDE project files into CVS along with the project. On the other hand, many teams have developers with some variation in their environments, so identical project files would not work for all team members. In this situation, you should not check the project files in; just check in the source code, Ant files, etc, and not the IDE project file(s).

I might add that, if there's a clear majority of developers using the exact same workspace settings, then it might make sense to add the project files used by that majority under version control. The others would then have to override the "default" with their own, but at least the majority wouldn't need to configure anything after checking out the project from CVS.

Having said that, I suppose it just might happen that every now and then someone mistakenly checks in their non-standard project files...